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by 'respond' i mean think about it in new ways. so i'm not advocating not being on computers or iphones but i'm advocating spending time away from computers and iphones and doing some weird shit for a while to change the way we think about computers and iphones.

one of my lecturers was once giving this lecture on fin-de-siecle literature. she said, 'in the late victorian period, our imperalism and global dominance was coming to an end relatively speaking. we had groundbreaking technological advances such as the bicycle, giving us new methods of transport. we were living on other people's money, and the service sector was predominant with no manufacturing of our own (it wasn't until the automobile industry stepped in that we started having a solid manufacturing industry in the 20th century.) religion was declining and literature was becoming increasingly amoral and hedonistic in its themes. does this remind you of any other time period?"

so that got me thinking. we're living in the cultural equivalent of the fin-de-siecle era, and we're due some kind of corresponding movement. this is of course avoiding the sticky issue of post-modernism, which we can't really define anyway.

also i think religion is on the decline but that's only part of a historical trend. pretty soon we'll have some kind of global catastrophe, which could be ANYTHING (global warming finally sinking in [heh], some kind of stupid world war caused by north korea or someone, some kind of technological impasse i.e. a moment when scientists need some kind of inspiration to come up with new discoveries) and religion will increase, more people will join churches, etc. just thinking about how religious people got in World War I. we live in a period of relative world pacifism but a more subtle world chaos that can't easily be detected. imagine the point when we live in world chaos.

so, put simply, imagine for a second that we are on the cultural point of late victorian england in terms of global anglo-american culture, and EVERYTHING makes sense. it probably started in the 1980s when our manufacturing began to swell up under thatcher/reagan, that was the start of the second 'fin-de-siecle' era, or perhaps the 6th or 7th or something. also, during late victorian britain there was a lot of right-wing rhetoric about how immigrants were buying up property in london and infiltrating our country. does that remind you of anything? god this is cool